I wonder what libraries have the highest circulation, and how many times their average books circulate, and things like that.Are these the kinds of things you consider?
The Loneliness of the Unread Books
I recall learning in Library School that the averages for circulation are around six times during the whole lifespan a book spends in a library.
I was shocked.
After all, the books I was reading were checked out six times while I still had them on reserve!
Then I realized for the first time how lonely average books must be in the libraries, and how lonely people who read them must be, knowing hardly anyone else was ever going to read them, and thus not being able from nearly the same perspective to share what they read.
We had some new friends over for dinner last night, and towards dessert, the conversation turned to books, and eventually to all the books that were now available online. They were quite interested in the travel accounts by women that Mary had been putting online, and remarked “You must have a passion for this.” When they found out that over 300 books had been republished on her site, on a completely volunteer basis, they said “that’s a *lot* of passion!”
I think that could be said about a lot of the people on the list.
Whether it’s the regular posters, or the folks who mostly lurk and occasionally send us email, this has been a group that’s been passionate about books, what they can do for people, and the importance of doing the best job we can to make them available to as many people as possible.
Well, life today, as so often, has been so hectic, with newspaper articles and interviews to do about the recent PR blitzes from billion dollar products or at least what they HOPE will be such, that I am down to the wire with well under an hour to Mark’s deadline and so I must do what I can with the time I have left…and apologize for not doing more.
As always, I lean more towards the future and less towards the past than most of us do, with a little care towards preserving such “look and feel” paper and it predecessors have given us over millennia.
My own concern at this final Book People juncture, is for the future, a future I think we will find a great of which we have failed to consider when and if we look back on this date a decade from now, or especially from even longer periods, though I will not likely be with you a decade from now.
eBooks as I invented them are what you would get if you sat at your computer and typed in a book the same way a person types in anything else, however, but most of the news items that claim a million books are book pictures rather than actual computer characters.
Here is the difference:
When you hear about a megabyte, that is the one million sized bunch of computer characters…just what we get if we typed in a million characters like this.
A gigabyte is a billion characters, or bytes.
A terabyte is a trillion characters…etc.
This month terabytes have been around $200, very cheap.